There is a difference between desire and entitlement. The first is the natural hunger of being alive — the wanting that draws us toward food, beauty, intimacy, meaning. The second is what happens when wanting forgets it is not the only thing in the room. I have come to call that second thing carnality. I do not mean sex alone, nor the natural desires of the body. I mean a rabid appetite stripped of reverence.
I weep with deep grief as I witness the destructive energy of carnality surging on our planet today.
This energy lives in our politics, our homes, our faith communities and schools. Each time I encounter it, I’m given another opportunity to examine and repair my own wounds—both those I have personally experienced and those handed down through the beliefs, habits and behaviors of my ancestors.
Each time it shows up, my defensive posture arises without thought. I feel a strong desire to flee into the safety of being alone. It is my instinctive response to a perceived threat. Perceived threat.
If I’m lucky enough to catch the instinctive response and my personal growth work kicks in, I stop and ask if there is a real physical or emotional threat. In this latest trigger, there was no real threat. I was safely at home, in a Zoom class with about 50 people. We were reflecting on desire itself and the way desire supports life. Of course, in the grip of my trigger, I couldn’t see that at the moment. I see it now.
I was not alone in feeling triggered. Others in the group had also been surprised by what was lurking in the shadow we call “desire.” Still others found the reflection wholesome and helpful to their own journey. That is how I began exploring carnality as something distinct from desire. My triggered reactivity is to carnality. Carnality is part of desire, but stripped of any restraint by care, nurture, or concern for others. I classify desire as a preference with energy.
Which brought me to the next series of questions. Starting with: how can we harness desire itself for common benefit without collapsing into carnality?
That leads to several more:
How can we repair our society?
What are the lessons we can learn, and the actions to take?
What is the impact of human carnality?
What do we want for the future?
Myself? I’ll be doing my own trauma work, certainly. But this next level of healing requires a response from others. A reset of societal rewards would be extremely helpful. How would we reset our societal rewards and norms?
We do not need a world without desire. We need a world where desire is disciplined by care.
This is where enlightenment comes in.
Not the enlightenment of floating above the body, or pretending we have outgrown our hunger. Not the enlightenment of moral superiority, where we point toward the most obvious offenders and imagine ourselves untouched by the same ancient forces. I mean enlightenment as the slow, sometimes painful practice of seeing clearly.
To be enlightened, in this moment, is to recognize the difference between desire and entitlement. It is to feel the surge of wanting and not immediately obey it. It is to notice the old stories that have excused taking, conquering, consuming and dominating—especially when those stories have been dressed up as masculinity, leadership, ambition, genius, or divine right.
The repair begins when we stop pretending that unrestrained appetite is freedom.
Freedom without conscience becomes violence. Desire without care becomes consumption. Power without restraint becomes domination. And when a society rewards domination long enough, trauma becomes part of the inheritance. It moves through families, churches, schools, workplaces, politics and nations. It teaches some people to take more than they need, and others to surrender more than they should.
So the work of enlightenment is not merely personal, though it must include the personal. I have to examine my own wounds, my own instincts, my own reactivity, my own temptation to flee or defend or judge. But personal healing alone will not repair a society that keeps rewarding the very patterns that harmed us.
We need a larger awakening.
We need to change what we admire. We need to stop confusing aggression with strength, possession with love, extraction with success, and conquest with leadership. We need to raise children with a deeper understanding of desire: that desire is powerful, beautiful and life-giving when it is held inside care, consent, responsibility and reverence. We need to teach ourselves, again and again, that having an impulse does not make it sacred. Wanting something does not make it right. Being powerful enough to take something does not make it ours.
Enlightenment is not a state of purity; it is the moment we become responsible for what we can finally see.
And what I can see now is this: we do not need a world without desire. We need a world where desire is disciplined by care. We need a world where appetite bows to dignity. We need a world where power is measured not by what it can seize, but by what it can protect, repair and make possible for others.
That is the repair I am reaching toward. Not the denial of the body, but the restoration of reverence. Not the shaming of desire, but its return to relationship. Not punishment alone, but accountability deep enough to interrupt the inheritance of harm.
Enlightenment begins when we stop passing trauma forward and start asking what kind of humans we must become for life to flourish after us.